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Day #85: Mimesis (2011)

[From IMDB:] A group of horror fans find themselves unwilling participants in a nightmarish role playing game that pays homage to a classic horror film.

My take:

I find myself really wanting to say that I enjoyed Mimesis. There’s something about the campy, self-referential quality of the movie that really appeals to me – largely because it captures something that I feel is missing in a lot of contemporary horror movies. Unfortunately…

I’ve been thinking on this for a bit, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s really only one, really important thing missing from this movie: tension. I didn’t feel any during the entire movie, and I think there’s a lot of factors that fed into this. The characters were paper thin; the acting wasn’t all that compelling (although Allen Maldonado wasn’t too bad); and the plot, while fundamentally intriguing (even if it did feel like a mish-mash of elements from several other common storylines), had just enough clumsy holes in it that I kept finding myself being pulled out of the story. One or two of these issues probably wouldn’t have been that bad on their own, but having them all combined was just a bit much.

Visually, the movie was also a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the camerawork was decent, minus the occasional pointless and distracting slow-mo/fast-mo of the film. On the other hand, the zombie make-up, well…I mean, I get that it was an homage to the zombies in the Night of the Living Dead, right? And that there are other factors revealed in the movie that might have contributed to the way they looked? But it still bugged me the whole time. It just looked kind of silly, homage or not.

So, I don’t have much good to say about Mimesis, but I also don’t think it should necessarily be avoided. I just think it falls into the movie night with friends category – particularly if you follow it up with a viewing of the original Night of the Living Dead, which is exactly what I feel like doing right now.